6 Quotes by Gannit Ankori

Judith Ferreto, Kahlo’s nurse and long-time care-giver, recalled that the last time she saw the artist, just days before her death, the artist declared: ‘Love is the only reason for living.

Unlike Rivera and the other muralists, who painted a monolithic hegemonic national narrative, Kahlo visually articulated a multidimensional Mexican past.

Kahlo’s paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion. Through the language of her innovative art Kahlo gives voice to silenced, unresolved traumata. She thus obliterates the barrier between the individual experiencing pain and the viewer, and evokes empathy for our shared human fragility.

Her physical and emotional experiences, which thwarted these ambitions, were powerful but not unique. Many people suffer from illness, accidents, a bad marriage and divorce. It was Kahlo’s responses to the experiences of her life, rather than the experiences themselves, combined with her rare talent for articulating them visually and giving meaning to them that distinguish Kahlo as a towering cultural figure.

The ‘unsharable’ nature of pain, Scarry goes on to argue, triggers a chain reaction that isolates the bearer of pain and frequently leads to a lack of compassion, alienation and often even cruelty on the part of those who are not afflicted and lack the capacity to acknowledge, let alone comprehend its existence.

Kahlo’s imaginative configurations of alternative selves and hybrid cosmologies transcend the genre of self-portraiture. They conjure up bold political, spiritual and ontological queries and open up radically new discursive realms.